


five times Lenore McCoy and Christopher Pike talked and one time there were no words

by charlestonIguess



Series: bones beats people up (fem!Reaper series) [1]
Category: Doom (2005), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Genderbending, Lenore McCoy - Freeform, Secrets, Star Trek: Into Darkness, awkward power dynamics, five + one, in which I mean pike is her superior but she'd 200 years old and yeah, lying, references to sex but no actual sex, that's a warning in itself, warning: written while sleep-deprived
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 19:18:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14119140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlestonIguess/pseuds/charlestonIguess
Summary: All stories have a beginning and an end. Theirs just didn't get a middle.





	five times Lenore McCoy and Christopher Pike talked and one time there were no words

**Author's Note:**

> hi! there's no excuse for this! I'm tired and I didn't even proofread this!

# five times Lenore McCoy and Chris Pike talked and one time there were no words

## one

The bar smelled. All bars smelled, especially to Lenore’s enhanced senses, but this one smelled particularly bad. The bathrooms were a no-go area, and the stench of sewage, sweat and come was enough for even baseline humans to avoid it. That didn’t mean the room was deserted – chance would be a fine thing – but rather that it only attracted people like her. Lonely, miserable people, looking to drown their sorrows. Divorced, childless suckers.

If only the damn bourbon had any effect on her.

In two centuries of this, Lenore hadn’t quite figured out how to bypass her metabolism and get drunk. She’d tried all sorts of things – things that sent her temporarily blind – but all she’d got out of it was a blinding headache and another failed experiment. That wouldn’t stop her from trying again, though. It seemed like it was all she had left, these days.

The door opened and a man in a dress shirt came in. He wrinkled his nose at the smell, but didn’t leave. Shame. He was dressed far too nicely for a dive like this. Lenore let her empty glass thump down on the sticky counter and signalled for another. The barman, a grizzly thirty something with a beer-belly and pit-stains, spilt half of the shot when he poured it out. She considered complaining, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

When the new guy sat down at the bar next to her, she reconsidered. She’d need another shot if this was going the way she thought it was. Hell, what part of drinking alone, slumped in this crappy dive, made it seem like she was looking for company? Maybe it was the jeans she’d been wearing for two weeks straight, or the suspicious stains on her shirt. Or, hell, when was the last time she’d brushed her hair?

“Excuse me,” the man said, and she sighed. Lenore turned to look at him. He was nice enough to look at, she mused. Greying-blonde hair, blue eyes, the sort of wrinkles that made him look distinguished rather than old, although she wasn’t about to judge a guy on how old he was. They were all infants compared to her. And the dress shirt under his jacket was good quality, and new at that, but the boots he was wearing were military grade and well-used.

“Starfleet,” she greeted. The slight widening of his eyes was all the conformation she needed. “What can I do for you?” she asked, turning back to her bourbon. It was crappy stuff, but all she could afford these days.

The man shifted on his stool to turn more fully towards her. He dropped his elbow to the bar and Lenore eyed it, wondering how quickly he’d move away from the stickiness. When he didn’t jerk back, she smiled.

“My name is Chris Pike,” he told her. “And your name is Lenore McCoy. Dr Lenore McCoy.”

That was unexpected. She didn’t let herself flinch, though, or even tense up, as much as she wanted to ready herself for whatever punch was coming next. “Not much of a doctor, these days,” she said instead, and drained the crappy bourbon.

“Well, why don’t you let me buy you a drink and maybe we can change that?”

Lenore glanced at him, eyebrow raised. He seemed genuine enough, meeting her gaze evenly, and he hadn’t once checked her breasts out, which was another mark in his favour. And honestly, at this point, what did she have to lose? So she tilted her head and said, “If you’re buying, I’m ordering something better than this pig swill.”

Pike’s lips twitched. “I’d expect nothing less, ma’am.” He signalled to the bartender and said, “Give me a whiskey on the rocks, with a twist.”

Lenore shook her head. “You do _not_ want to try the ice from here,” she warned.

“Huh,” Pike said. “In that case, you have tonic?” The barman nodded. “And whatever the lady wants.”

“Give me the Kentucky,” she ordered. Pike raised his eyebrows and she shrugged. “It’s not like they’ve got Rip Van Winkle here. The Kentucky is about as top shelf as they get.”

He nodded, conceding the point. The bartender brought their drinks back and Pike handed over his credit chip. Transaction complete, they were left alone. Lenore took a sip of her drink and waited.

It didn’t take long. Pike took a sip of his whiskey, grimaced, and put it in front of him before he swivelled on the stool and stared at her. “Doctor,” he started. “You must know why I’m here.” She tilted her head but made no other response. He sighed. “I hear your neural grafting technique is revolutionary.”

“Mm-hmm,” Lenore agreed.

“You’re one of the most talented and qualified trauma surgeons on the continent,” he continued, “If not the world.”

Probably the world, she thought. “Yup.”

“Starfleet needs people like you,” Pike said, and there it was.

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “You know a lot about me,” she drawled. “So I assume you’ve read my file?” At his nod, she added, “So Starfleet needs a registered aviophobe?”

To his credit, he didn’t flinch. “There are plenty of ways you can serve the federation without being on a spaceship. And, if you don’t want to serve on a spacestation, we can find you a nice planet-side base.”

Almost tempting. Besides, it wasn’t like she was actually an aviophobe, but Lenore had gone on record with it after her mother’s shuttle crash when she was eight. Still… She shrugged. “Alright. What’s in it for me?”

Pike clearly had this memorised. “State of the art facilities, research grants and the smartest minds from around the galaxy. Situations that you will never experience in any other business, pushing you to discover and heal in ways you’d never imagined. And,” he said, eying her with a sort of weight that made her feel uncomfortable, “You’d be doing a great deal of good.”

“Serving my country?” She snorted into her glass. “You can’t actually thing I’d go for that.”

“No,” Pike agreed. “But it would give you a chance to be a doctor again. Which, given that it’s been six months since you tendered your resignation to Mississippi General and you’re not back in work yet, sounds like something you might be interested in.”

He had her there. The shit that went down with John with their divorce had marked her as unreliable, and there was a black mark on her record called ‘David McCoy’ that she didn’t like to think about. She’d considered starting afresh with a new name, but Lenore wasn’t quite done being a doctor yet, and she never let herself follow the same path twice.

“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s your sales pitch?”

Pike smirked. “No,” he said. “That was getting you to listen. _This_ is my sales pitch.” He pulled a file out from his jacket and placed it on the bar in front of her. Intrigued despite herself, she flipped it open and whistled at the offer in front of her.

“Ranking Lieutenant from the start?” she asked, tilting her head at him. “And that is a very pretty research grant.” She hadn’t had the chance, with John and David and everything that had happened this year, to continue her research. This was an opportunity to save a hell of a lot of lives. Plus, the salary was a pretty penny, especially with the fact that, when she went into service, her expenses would be mostly paid. “What’s the catch?”

Pike tilted his head. “We’d like you to attend the academy.”

She grimaced. “I’ve already got two PhDs-”

“I know,” he said, holding his hands up. “But none of your degrees are in xenobiology. Plus, with the extra training that you would go through at the academy, you could graduate Lieutenant Commander.” That was interesting, she had to admit. The less people telling her what to do, the better. “And we’re happy to put you in an accelerated programme. Three years, not four.”

It was the best deal she was going to get. “Alright,” she said, flipping the file closed. She downed the rest of her drink and glanced back at the man next to her. “I assume you won’t be my direct superior?”

“Not unless you come and work on the Enterprise,” he said, a smug smile teasing the corner of his lips. “You’ll be graduating just about the same time as our maiden voyage.”

“Captain, huh?” she said. She looked him up and down once more and made a decision. “And what are the rules on fraternisation?”

Pike almost spilled his drink in his haste to stare at her. It took him a second to remember himself, and then he blurted out, “It’s frowned upon.”

Lenore let herself smile. “Good thing you won’t be my superior until I finish this paperwork then, huh?”

Pike blinked and then said, “I think we could postpone it until the morning. I have a room near here…”

“Hope it’s not too near,” she said, sliding off her stool. “This place is a dive.”

 

## two

Somehow, Lenore thought, Jim Kirk would be the death of her. She stared at the chart in her hands, because otherwise she’d have to stare at Jim’s pale face against the white sheets of Starfleet Medical, and that just seemed like a one-way trip to madness.

“He’ll be okay,” Chris Pike said, standing next to her. He was in uniform, arms folded over his chest. His voice sounded about as exhausted as she felt. “Lenore, you saved him.”

“This time,” she muttered, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear impatiently. She’d had a ponytail earlier, but the later it got, the less hair the band seemed to hold. “What happens next time?”

“You’ll be there,” Chris told her. “I don’t doubt that for a second.” They fell silent, and she looked through the glass to Jim’s face. The bruising over his eye was getting darker by the hour. God damn Terra Prime.

The terrorists had attacked their basic survival class while they were in Arizona. Lenore had only been along as a field medic, and because the credit would look good on her transcript. Jim had beamed when she told him she’d signed up for the same section as him. Now she was just glad she had been there. If any of the other medical track students had been…

The bullet in Jim’s head would have killed him. It should have killed him. But Lenore was good at what she did, and she had one of the sub-dermal neurostabilisers that she’d been developing on hand. But she’d ended up pulling bullet fragments out with a pair of tweezers, and there was no telling the type of damage the bullet had done.

“Lenore,” Chris said softly. “Whatever happens, you did the right thing.”

“If he wakes up-”

“When,” he corrected. She shook her head. “Lenore, that’s Jim Kirk in there. You really think he’s going to go down from something like this?”

That brought a reluctant smile to her face. “Better this than eating some shellfish,” she muttered, and Chris chuckled. He squeezed her shoulder gently.

“You had a rest since this happened?”

He knew she hadn’t. The emergency transport to Starfleet Medical had been her holding Jim’s head together. The only time she’d stepped away had been to scrub in, and then she’d been in surgery with him for eight hours. She’d had the chance to change into a clean pair of scrubs after surgery, but now Jim was in post-op she wasn’t going to leave him. What if she had to take him back in?

If she’d taken the bullet for him, they wouldn’t be here.

“Lenore, come on,” Chris said, tugging at her shoulder. “You need to rest.”

“I can’t,” she whispered, voice rough. “I can’t leave him.”

Chris sighed. “Give me a minute,” he told her, and then left her alone. She didn’t bother watching him leave. In the year and a half she’d been at the academy, they’d managed to reach a sort of fragile equilibrium, the type that acknowledged that two people had had sex and still had to interact professionally. But there were too many barriers for it to become a friendship – his rank, her past. The only thing that kept them interacting was lying on a bed in front of her.

_Damn it, Jim._ The kid really would be the death of her. Two hundred years and the various injuries she’d received hadn’t managed it, but she was fairly certain she’d keel over with a heart attack one of these days. She had a sort of conditioned fear response every time her comm beeped at the moment.

The doors to the corridor opened and Chris came back, accompanied by Dr Boyce. Lenore’s heart skipped a beat. What did the head of Starfleet Medical want with her? Then she remembered – Boyce had been Chris’s CMO on the Yorktown, back when he was still floundering around in space rather than on the ground, like a sensible person.

“Dr McCoy,” Boyce greeted her. She had the most bizarre urge to blush.

“Dr Boyce,” she returned with a polite nod. “Captain,” she added. Chris rolled his eyes at her.

“Lenore, Phil here has agreed to sit with your patient so you can catch an actual nap and put your own clothes back on.” Chris shot a look at her feet, which happened to be in pink sandals she’d got out of the lost and found. She refused to be embarrassed. “Will that reassure you enough that I can actually take you home?”

She sighed so hard her nostrils flared. Damn him. If she refused, she ran the risk of offending the head of _Starfleet Medical_ , one of the greatest trauma surgeons in history. But if she accepted, she’d have to leave Jim to a stranger.

She was tired, though. Her post-combat low was hitting, and if she didn’t get some rest soon her hands would start to tremble. Plus… well, clean clothes sounded good around now. And maybe some time to yell at the morons who organised the god damn survival trek in the first place and yet failed to keep their students safe. Whoever was in charge of this train wreck was going to get the dressing down of his life when she found him.

Still, she hesitated. Leaving Jim just didn’t sit right on her shoulders.

“Doctor,” Boyce said. “I know what you’re feeling right now.” She grimaced and stared determinedly at the glass wall. “You have to remember, Dr McCoy, that while you saved him, you don’t have to do everything on your own. We work in teams for a reason, and the team here is pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.”

She looked at him and wondered why there were so many people around here with bright blue eyes. And, on that vein, why she was starting to trust people with said blue eyes, when Chris had pulled her into this shit show and Jim was the gift that kept on breaking bones. She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.

“You’ll contact me immediately if his situation changes?”

“If it worsens, yes,” Dr Boyce prevaricated. “Let Chris take care of you, now.”

And she nodded. She handed over Jim’s chart with stiff fingers, and let Chris guide her away from the glass. “Let’s get you back to your room,” the captain said. “Jim’s in good hands now.”

That might be true. But they weren’t her hands.

 

## three

Getting a request for a meeting from Chris wasn’t exactly unusual, but she hadn’t been expecting a review any time soon, and she didn’t think Jim was in more trouble than usual, so Lenore’s interest was piqued. She sent back her acknowledgement and packed her bag up, slinging it over her shoulder.

“Going somewhere?” Jim asked around a mouthful of apple. Gaila looked up inquisitively, but Gary ignored them.

“Got a meeting with Pike,” she muttered. “Eat some real food, kid.”

“Apples are real!” he called to her as she walked away, and she ignored the turning heads that Jim managed to garner in every room he existed in. Sometimes being friends with that kid was a goddamn trial.

She left the library and headed next door to the administration building, where Pike had his office as Commandant of Cadets. She’d been there often enough over the last two years – though not as often as Jim, bless his soul – that Casey, Pike’s assistant/minion, just waved her in.

“He’s not in a good mood,” he warned, which was just the icing on top of this day. She nodded at him and rapped sharply on the door.

“Get in here, McCoy,” Chris snapped. The door opened and he poked his head out. “Casey, take a break. And make sure no one interrupts us.”

Lenore’s eyebrows hit her hairline. She hadn’t seen Chris this angry since she had to deliver three upperclassmen accused of drugging a fresher into his waiting arms. And even then, he’d had a warm word for her. She found herself trying to figure out exactly what she’d done to piss him off.

He didn’t offer her a seat. She stood at attention in front of his desk and waited. She was definitely struggling to remember anything she’d done recently… hell, even Jim had calmed down with his exploits over the last few months, since the Terra Prime incident.

Chris stalked back to his seat and threw himself into it, glaring fiercely at the desk. He picked up the padd in front of him and flicked through it for a second before sighing explosively and turning his scowl onto her. She found herself scowling back automatically. That seemed to take him aback, because his scowl dissipated and this time when he sighed it was more sad than angry.

“Sit down, cadet,” he ordered. She eyed him warily as she slid into a seat.

When he didn’t say anything immediately, she shifted in her seat and asked, “Captain, is something wrong?”

“You could say that,” Chris muttered. He sank into his own seat behind his desk and ran a hand through his hair. The next sigh was harried. “Jesus, McCoy. I thought Jim was gonna be the one to give me an ulcer, but you’re really pushing the boat out here.”

Lenore was coming up blank. “Uh,” she said intelligently. “You want to clue me in here, Chris?”

That’s when Chris exploded. He was on his feet, hands waving in the air, but his words didn’t offer any clarification for her. “You just waltzed in here and thought, ‘Hey, I know what, I’ll just offer some miracles and make everyone care about me and lie to them the whole time,’ like it’s not the worst shit a human can pull on anyone, like it’s not goddamn monstrous-”

“What in tarnation are you talking about?” she demanded, also on her feet. She couldn’t quite pinpoint when she’d stood up. “Chris, I’ve not lied-”

The look he shot her was pure venom. “Tell me that again, _Joanna Grimm_.”

For a second, Lenore was sure she hadn’t heard him properly. Or maybe this was a nightmare, one of her horrible dreams that felt more real than her everyday life did some days. But she blinked and he was still standing there, glaring at her, chest heaving like he’d run a race rather than tear her life apart with one sentence.

For the first time in years, Lenore felt truly, utterly, completely _terrified_.

Chris laughed. It was a bitter thing that only lasted a second, and then he turned to the window and slammed his hands down onto the ledge with a _thud_ that seemed to hit her in the stomach. “You fucking _bitch_.”

If he kept going like that, she was going to have bruises. The word hit her like a stone and she had to tense her legs so she didn’t take a step back. But, hell, at least the terror was fading, replaced by a heat that was all too familiar to her these days, curdling low in her chest and reaching up and out.

“Don’t call me that,” she told him, throat tight. She swallowed.

Chris laughed again. “You think you get to tell me what to say right now? You?” He spun back to her, gesticulating wildly. “You’re a fucking liar, _Joanna_. You conned your way in here, conned your way into Starfleet, by pretending to be a dead girl, pretending to be a doctor, pretending to be _human-_ ”

“Fuck you,” she snarled, slamming her hands on the desk between them. It was a goddamn miracle the wood didn’t snap. “Who the hell are you to call me a liar? I goddamn am Lenore McCoy-”

“I found her death certificate!” he roared. “Car crash at eighteen, dead on impact, and you _stole_ her _life-_ ”

“I was _given_ her life!” Lenore didn’t mean to scream the words. She didn’t mean to roar back at him at all but the words were suddenly between them. Chris was silent. She scrubbed a hand over her face and said the words again: “I was given her life.”

“What – what are you talking about?” he asked. She shook her head but he asked her again. “Lenore, what are you talking about?”

He didn’t even realise what he called her, she knew. But when she looked at him, he was still so angry. She didn’t know if she was angry any more.

“My brother had a kid,” she started. “And he had a kid, and she had a kid, and somewhere along the line David McCoy was born and he was just – spectacular, Chris, he was spectacular. So bright and kind and compassionate and I loved that kid as much as I knew how to love.” She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the fact that it shuddered. “I got to watch him grow up and get married to a sweetheart named Eleanor, and then they had two kids. They had Lenore first,” she said. She pressed her hands against the desk. “Then Sarah, a couple of years later.

“Eleanor and Sarah died in a shuttle crash six years after their last baby was born. David – he was heartbroken, but he lived for Lenore. And she was a sweet girl, so goddamn happy and bright, my spitting image but not one bit like me. She was too good to be anything like me. She got into medical school at sixteen and never hesitated, not for a second. And she died, Chris.” Lenore – _her_ voice didn’t break. She wished it could. “Eighteen years old, her best friend driving drunk – so fucking stupid.”

Chris was staring at her. Lenore didn’t want to think about what he saw. She kept going. “David called me. First thing he did – his Ma had died, though his Daddy was still around, but I was the only one he wanted to call. When his last baby was dead, he called me. I went as soon as I could and – I swear, Chris, I swear it – I only went to comfort him. But when I got there…”

“He suggested you become her,” Chris said, voice low. “He wanted you to take her place?”

Lenore shrugged. “He didn’t want me to be his daughter. He wanted her life to… keep going, keep meaning something. He wanted me to carry that, for her.”

Chris exhaled. He sank into his chair, but Lenore stayed standing. She didn’t think she could keep going otherwise.

“So you did?”

She bit the inside of her cheek, nodding. “I went to medical school. I was two years behind but… I’ve learnt a lot over the last couple of centuries. I found I had an aptitude for it. Besides,” she added, more to herself than to Chris, “I promised someone I’d give life behind a microscope a try.”

Chris swallowed, looked at his desk, looked back to her. “Why did you join Starfleet?”

Lenore thought back to their first meeting. She thought about the way the alcohol didn’t do anything for her but how she kept drinking it anyway. She thought about Chris’s dress shirt and well-worn boots. She said, “Because you asked.”

They fell silent. Chris’s breathing was loud in the room, but Lenore’s wasn’t. She knew how to take quick, shallow breaths that didn’t make a sound. She knew how to hold herself still and wait, to let someone else make the first move. This didn’t feel like that.

“What the hell do we do now?” Chris asked her and Lenore laughed.

“I guess,” she said slowly, sinking into her chair, “You could ask me. If you wanted.”

He stared at her in that way of his, with steady blue eyes that stripped her bare beneath him, till it was just her soul sitting there and letting him look at her. It was far more intimate than sex ever had been.

Then he smiled. “I think we need a drink or two before we start down that rabbit hole.” And Lenore smiled too.

 

## four

The _Enterprise_ was limping home and, for most of the ship, it was time to reflect on what the hell had happened in the last few days, to Vulcan, to their crew and the crews of the eight other starships that had headed to its aid, and almost to Earth. For Lenore, the time to reflect would have been a goddamn gift, because she’d use it to sleep or eat or take a fucking shower.

“Send their stats to my padd,” she told Nurse In’gabi, who nodded xer head and blinked five pairs of eyes at her in acknowledgement. “Then check their saline and try and get some rest.” The nurse disappeared to xer patients and left Lenore studying the increasingly concerning vitals of the three Vulcans currently asleep in her sickbay.

“You should follow your own advice.” Chris’s voice was creaky from disuse, but still familiar enough not to scare her witless. She turned to blink at him uselessly, genuinely surprised by the fact that he was awake. “And close your trap before you catch flies,” he added, obnoxious as ever.

Her mouth shut with a _clack_. She beat a hasty path to his side, tugging the curtain closed behind her, and checked the readout on the biobed. She opened her mouth again to speak, but no words came out. He was looking at her, amusement practically pouring off of him, and she shut her mouth again to glare at him.

“Doctor,” he told her slowly, “You are a sight for sore eyes.”

She scowled harder at that. “I can put you back to sleep.”

He laughed. It must have jarred something, because he was cut off with a wince and his heartbeat spiked for a second. She sighed and reached for the controls, checking the levels of his painkillers again, then tapped the button for him.

“Don’t,” he started and she hesitated. “I don’t want to sleep again.”

She recognised that look in his eyes. “I’m just upping the painkillers,” she told him. “No sleeping, not right now. But I’m not leaving you in pain if I can do something about it.”

He stared at her and his eyes were – lost, swimming, somewhere Lenore was sure she couldn’t follow. She didn’t really want to, she thought bitterly. This whole thing was one long nightmare after another. “Lenore,” he said. Then: “ _Lenore_.”

She took his hand in both of hers. He grasped at her and she just – let him. She didn’t think – well, it didn’t matter what she thought. Not right now. Now she just held his hand. But it didn’t last long enough.

“I suppose you have a lot of other patients you need to see?” He pulled away from her. She let him.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of patients I have,” she muttered, turning back to her padd with a well-worn scowl. “I’m the goddamn CMO of this hellscape. Dr Puri-”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “God, Lenore, do I want to know the casualty count?”

No, he didn’t. But she’d tell him eventually. They both knew that. For now, she shook her head and said, “Jim’ll brief you in a bit. I want you to get some equilibrium back before I subject you to that.”

“Why can’t the Captain come down here and brief me himself? Am I not important enough?” Chris was smiling as he asked, so it took Lenore a minute to figure out what he meant. It was long enough for Chris to lose his smile and start to look concerned. “Lenore, is something wrong with Spock?”

Oh. “He’s fine,” she told him. She scratched behind her ear and tried to figure out how to sell this. “It’s, uh, just that, well. Uh-”

“Spit it out, doctor,” Chris growled.

“Spock’s not the captain?”

Chris blinked. “That a question?”

Well, Lenore still wasn’t quite sure about what the hell was going on, so yeah, kind of. “No, sir,” she managed. “Spock resigned his position on the basis that he was emotionally compromised. As acting first officer, appointed by, uh, you, Jim assumed command. He’s Captain, now.” That was a lot more succinct than the whole mess felt in her head. She could still see Jim’s pod streaking down towards Delta Vega in her head.

“Huh,” Chris said, which – to be fair – kind of summarised it. She tilted her head in acknowledgement.

“Yup,” she muttered. “That about sums it up.”

Chris grinned. “I can’t believe we’re alive,” he told her. “I really…”

Thought we were all going to die, Lenore finished in her head. Yeah, the feeling was mutual. “You nearly died,” she blurted. Blood rushed into her cheeks and she ducked back to the padd to avoid the look in Chris’s eyes, the look that said _yes I know, I felt it all_.

She was expected some sort of pithy, Chris-like comment. Instead, she felt a brief stroke of fingers against the back of her palm and when she looked down, he was waiting for her to take his hand in hers, eyes wide and guileless in ways that Lenore wasn’t sure she knew how to be. She took his hand.

“I know,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

_Sorry for what?_ she wanted to scream. Sorry for nearly dying? For dragging their ship into this mess in the first place? For recruiting her? For fucking her? For figuring out her secret and not – not letting her run away from him? For giving her the best opportunity she’d had in two fucking centuries? Instead she shook her head and squeezed his hand silently, trying to let him know – everything.

He smiled. That was when Jim stumbled through the curtains and broke out into his patented Jim Kirk ™ grin. Lenore dropped Chris’s hand with a scowl and turned on him instead. He hadn’t exactly stayed still long enough for her to check him over, and she knew he was hiding injuries under those stupid gold shirts of his. His grin didn’t waver under the strength of her scowl, which only served to fuel her anger.

“ _Jim_.”

“Hi, Bones!”

## Five

After Olduvai, after Spock and Jim learnt the truth, after a shower and a night’s sleep, Lenore found herself seated in front of a subspace comm channel staring at Chris. He was looking older by the day at the moment, but for once Lenore was sure she looked older. She at least felt her age.

“So,” he said. “They know.”

“Yeah,” she drawled. “Thanks for that, by the way.” She shrugged, her hair loose down her back rather than tied back away from her face. She wasn’t on duty, for all she was wearing her blues. No one seemed to know when she was going to be back on duty. No one seemed to know what to do with her at all. And, to be fair to them, it wasn’t exactly their usual sort of situation. What did one say to their fellow crewmate when they found out said crewmate was two centuries old and practically immortal?

She rubbed her ribs and sighed. The ache from the day before hadn’t quite faded. Mostly it was psychosomatic by this point, but that didn’t make it hurt less.

“Listen, Len, it was going to come out one way or another,” Chris said. “If I figured it out, Jim was always going to. And at least this way it happened because you were doing something important.”

“Something important,” she echoed. Sarge’s face danced behind her eyelids. Yeah, that was one way to put it. “It came out that I’d lied to them and I was being forced to tell them the truth. I don’t think they’re going to be particularly happy with me.”

Chris shrugged. “They’ll forgive you. You guys, you’re a family. A bloody weird one, but a family all the same.”

She didn’t really know what to say to that, so she just tilted her head to acknowledge the point. Instead, she said, “Are we supposed to be debriefing?”

He laughed and nodded. “Yeah.” Neither of them said anything. It seemed about right. She stared at Chris’s eyes and felt something – right. Something normal. Chris… His eyes were a comfortable pressure, a familiar weight that centred her, warmed her. She wondered if it would always be this way between them, or if that would change the longer she spent on the _Enterprise_. She hoped it wouldn’t change.

She smiled, tilted her head, and said, “Where shall we begin, Admiral?”

Chris smiled back. “Tell me what happened. From that start, if you’d be so kind, Doctor.”

And she opened her mouth and told him.

 

## six (+ one time there were no words)

Admiral Pike’s funeral was a formal occurrence, full of pomp and circumstance and other admirals and officers bowing their heads and saying serious sounding phrases like, ‘We’ll never see his like again’ and ‘He died as he lived’. It was Starfleet through and through.

Lenore turned up in her dress uniform with a flask in her top pocket. She marched in with the other members of the command crew of the _Enterprise_ , but she didn’t walk into their pew with them. She went to Dr Boyce’s side instead, silent and angry, so fucking angry she didn’t know how to express it, and when she got there all she could do was offer him the goddamn flask.

He glanced between her face and the flask in her hand and grinned, lopsided and old and tired, and took the drink. He handed it back and she turned on her heel, smartly, formally, marching just as well as any of these admirals and commodores and stupid fucking fancy ass officers who’d never left the safety of the earth, and then she joined Jim and the others. Sulu and Uhura stepped back so she could move past them to take her place beside Spock.

Jim kept his eyes trained forwards, but Spock turned to her, eyebrows just slightly raised. She shook her head and took another drink from the goddamn flask. If she was going to get yelled at for her conduct, she might as well get something out of it.

She kept it together. Barely, she’d admit later, but she did. Jim started crying sometime into it, silent, manly tears, but Lenore couldn’t feel his grief. She was too angry. She let the show wash over her and stood when everyone else did. She listened to the fucking bagpipes of doom and glared firmly forwards as they folded the flag and pressed it into Jim’s hands, because of course Jim was his closest family member – Chris gave his life to Starfleet and even in death they couldn’t give him something back. Jim was up there as a publicity stunt, pure and simple, and the crowd of cameras in the back went wild when he accepted the flag, tearstains still on his cheeks.

She wanted to rip their heads off of their necks. She could do it too.

Spock, bless his soul, stopped her. He wasn’t even subtle about it either, reaching over and grabbing her hand in his and _squeezing_ sharply, just as she was about to launch herself forwards and start ripping. It didn’t settle her, exactly, but she rocked back on her heels and huffed out a breath that was meant for him and for all of Starfleet. Spock let go of her hand.

Later, at the memorial, she stood by the windows of the observation deck and stared out at the wreckage of San Francisco. Jim stepped up beside her and she offered him the flask. He took it, took a drink, handed it back.

They fell silent for moment. Then:

“Did you love him?”

It’s not the question she was expecting, but it’s not entirely unexpected, either. She shrugged. “Not like you did.”

Jim tilted his head, looked at her, eyes narrowed. “That’s not an answer.”

She sighed and let herself think about Chris. She thought about him at their first meeting – shiny and serious and flustered when she downed her drink and propositioned him. She thought about how they fucked, about how his hands were gently on her skin even while his teeth and lips left bruises that would fade before morning. She thought about how he looked at Jim when he thought no one was looking, delicately, hopefully, like he was looking at the future and was lucky enough to get to touch it. She thought about his anger and heartbreak when he thought she’d betrayed him, and the way he took her hands in his afterwards, and kissed her gently when they spent one last night together. She thought about him on the _Enterprise_ , listening to Jim and sacrificing himself and losing his legs and never, not once, faltering or breaking down or shattering under the pressure. She thought about the way he’d thanked her for saving his life, as if it was good enough that she’d nearly not brought his legs back with him. She thought about how he’d looked at her when she cut her hair to go down to Olduvai, when she’d turned herself into Reaper and lost everything that made her Bones, that made her Lenore McCoy. She thought about the look in his eyes the next day, when he had stared at her and told her – nothing, but everything at the same time.

She thought about Chris and then she turned to Jim and said, “Yeah, it is.”

Below them, San Francisco was broken, scarred by a madman with a vendetta too big for mortal men to grasp. But above them, the stars spread out across the sky, unchanging, undamaged, and that’s where she looked. The final frontier was waiting, and she had no plans to leave it that way.


End file.
